Local councils can play an important role in making the lives of individuals, families and communities so much better than they are today.
They are made up of elected members and administrative officers who are there to serve communities. Local councils operate from the heart of the communities and are therefore ideally placed to understand best the needs of the communities they serve and to see that those needs are satisfied. In serving their community, local councils must have the money, authority and influence to do so. They must also develop a holistic vision and apply it efficiently if their work is to go beyond the bread-and-butter responsibilities they have. This vision must be a dynamic one and must benefit all the stakeholders of the community.
The local council reform said all the right things about how a council should operate. Yet we were never given an answer whenever we asked the Nationalist government how it intended to put into practice the goals it had set.
Now, over a year from the implementation of these reforms, it is more than evident that this exercise was mostly pie in the sky as the central government continues to pull all the strings. Local councils have been buried under a bureaucratic maze that leaves councillors with one of two options: fight an uphill battle to apply some form of vision that works in the best interests of the families they serve or surrender to the bureaucratic demands, possibly engaging in useless internal squabbles, at the expense of their communities.
Systems and processes are of course a type of positively needed bureaucracy that should be an enabler for councils to best serve their communities. Yet the bureaucratic culture that engulfs council operations is of the counter-productive type behind which servants of communities can hide and shirk away from their responsibilities.
The Labour Party is making it very clear that all those who come forward to serve their communities on local councils must, first and foremost, be committed to the well-being of the communities they serve.
Bureaucracy is there to make sure that all endeavours are transparent and to give a full account of what is spent. Bureaucracy must, however, be of the “yes we can” type to all justifiable requests. It is certainly not there to allow representatives, administrators and central government to play their political games at the expense of the people.
Leader of the Opposition Joseph Muscat has made it very clear that it is in this spirit that the Labour Party is inviting persons of goodwill to join the Labour Party to represent the communities they wish to serve. It is in the spirit where the interests of individuals, families and communities come first and foremost, that Labour will contest the upcoming local council elections.
Labour could have chosen the easy route and let sleeping dogs lie. But this is not the route it will take under the stewardship of Dr Muscat. It may be a brave way to go about it and it may put at risk Labour’s performance in the upcoming local council elections. However, we believe that it is the right way to go about it if we are to serve the interest of our country and that of those who make up our communities.